CodeWarrior

A spiffy compiler sold by Metrowerks (the best tech support on planet Earth, or so Mac programmers used to feel after dealing with Symantec and MPW).

Unfortunately, it's too expensive to make a good hacker toy. Their subscription upgrade plan costs of couple of hundred bucks a year, and everyone you want to share code with is already running the latest and greatest version.

A set of software development tools created by Metrowerks. There is a Linux version that combines the GNU compilers and linkers with the CodeWarrior IDE. CW originally gained popularity on the Macintosh with its PowerPC code generation, then it targetted Windows and embedded systems.

Many people make the misstake of misspelling the name as Code Warrior. There is no embedded space.

The primary IDE for building PalmOS applications. Palm has exclusive rights to CodeWarrior for their version of the environment, currently in Version 6 (as of August 2000).

I particularly like CodeWarrior as it is one of very few almost seamless ports between Wintel and MacOS. Of course moving resource files from one to the other remains a problem.

The only problem with Palm having the PalmOS version of Metrowerks in house is that now Metrowerks can not as easily provide the stellar support they could when they had control over it, which bites. Palm, like it's arch rival, rarely admits to bugs, where Metrowerks always made sure their tools were the best, damn the publicity.

One thing to watch out for is when using Code Warrior is using the default include files. I don't know if this is simply a problem with the older version I use (the computer runs Windows NT 4.0, so the software has dated a bit), but the include files are missing pretty essential items.

If you need things such as kbhit() or getch(), be prepared to burn yourself a disc (or split a zip on to multiple floppies if you're that type) of more complete include files.